While Ethereum hasn’t been around for long, it is definitely attracting the attention of hundreds upon hundreds of technology companies, including Microsoft, currently worth around $561 billion.
With this aspect in mind, not long ago, Microsoft has announced and released the Coco framework, which stands for Confidential Consortium. To put things better into perspective, Coco is actually an Ethereum-based project which will allow both large-scale organizations alongside with commercial companies to process information via the Ethereum blockchain, while getting access to much better privacy and data protection.
In a recent statement made by the CTO of Microsoft Azure, “Coco presents an alternative approach to ledger construction, giving enterprises the scalability, distributed governance and enhanced confidentiality they need without sacrificing the inherent security and immutability they expect.”
It is important to point out the fact that one of the main benefits associated with the Coco Framework is the fact that it is capable of leveraging local hardware environments, such as the Intel trusted execution environment, for instance, which in return, will help provide information settlement, off-the-chain, yet still using the Ethereum Blockchain system, which is simply impressive.
This represents a different solution to the problem of privacy, and transparency only within the walls of a company. So far, when a company wanted to implement a blockchain transparency and security system, they would just create a private, blockchain protocol that only members of the organization would have access to. The solution brought by Microsoft will help the company save resources, and sort of create their very own private part of the network, within the network, hence not affecting Ethereum in any way, but still using it, boosting its popularity and learning more about its wide array of uses.
It is expected that the Microsoft Coco Network that we have just mentioned, but also that other smart contract platforms which are actively being developed by tech companies throughout the world, but also by organizations that are part of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, will help increase the scalability of Ethereum, as it will help leverage solutions that are off-the-chain. In the long run, this will likely help develop decentralized applications that can process huge amounts of data, without having to deal with security and privacy issues, directly on the Ethereum network.
Based on everything that has been outlined so far, what do you personally think about Microsoft’s Coco Framework and the off-the-chain solutions for Ethereum that are being debated by numerous companies? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.